Apple Cheats iPhone Owners Ahead Of Upgrade Time

It basically amounts to theft. Apple has admitted to pushing updates to older phones that slow your iPhone down, but then they try to pawn it off in true Apple style as a “feature”. Rather than telling you your battery is no good and you need a new one, they slow your phone down.

Apple iPhone X – Photo from GSM Arena

It isn’t a feature! It’s theft! If you get a pie from the market and then pay for it at the register, you expect to find the whole pie there when you get home. You don’t expect the cashier to have squirreled your pie away while you weren’t looking and removed a piece to put back at the bakery so you would be compelled to come back and buy another pie!

You bought and paid for that hardware, so they have no right to do this. They tried to hide it for a long time, denying claims of devices running slower as anecdote and despite proof that legacy hardware was still quite capable of handling upgraded features. Now they were caught Reddit handed and had no choice but to fess up!

The push was for planned obsolescence, which I can agree with to some degree. So you didn’t get all the new bells and whistles turned on a year later in a software upgrade. Okay. Fine. You bought what is in your hand and some support for new patches and software upgrades. You may get lucky in the new feature littery too. All phones are like that. But to have them reach back and take away from what was already yours? WRONG!

Apple is playing the PR role here and politely saying they aren’t incentivizing you to upgrade, but how would you know if you thought your old phone were just getting automagically slower with age? That must be it, right? They just wear out like putting a couple hundred thousand miles on the car. Apple didn’t volunteer to share that they were throttling your device due to a weaker battery, so you may think a new device would be the fix when in reality, your phone works just fine. Of course a new phone will also fix the problem, for several hundred dollars more. Apple wins, the phone retailer wins, the phone carrier wins, phone insurance wins (if you pay for it). A new battery could have been $150 or less and extended the life of your phone by even two years.

Don’t get me wrong. I like iOS and Apple devices just fine, really. I don’t own any presently because I don’t want to spend my money there, but they’re good devices with a sound and user-friendly interface, and a great app store. But no user and customer deserves to be treated like this. They should have been up front about it. They should have said your battery performance is too weak to sustain processing at peak speed and you either need a new battery or you need to accept a decreased performance mode. They didn’t offer you that choice through. They made it for you. I prefer to have the ability to make these kinds of choices for myself and Apple apparently doesn’t think I’m to be trusted with that.

Android Performance Mode Settings Screenshot

That is what makes Android superior in many (but not all) ways. I can customize my performance as shown in this screenshot on my Android 7 phone (Samsung Galaxy Note 8). Don’t like the way your system is being handled? Flash a new custom or barebones ROM or add a different app to make it do what you want. Yes, risk comes with independence (I’ve heard that said of other things besides smartphone ecosystems too).